This weekend’s New York Times Magazine cover story profiled the Roosevelt Institute’s efforts to rewrite the rules of America’s economy and influence the 2016 economic debate. The wide-ranging piece chronicles the work by Roosevelt President and CEO Felicia Wong, Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz, and top staff and Fellows to transform the economic narrative and elevate the need for bold, comprehensive reforms to the economy.
Gideon Lewis-Kraus details how Roosevelt engaged prominent academics, activists, progressive leaders, and labor leaders to build a coalition around its “Rewriting the Rules” report and agenda, as well as Roosevelt’s close communication with Secretary Clinton’s campaign on policy and messaging. Wong, Stiglitz, and others believed the public appetite for change created an opportunity for progressives to push bolder economic reforms and an updated theory about how the economy had changed and how to fix it.
“Stiglitz and Wong each saw the election as an opportunity to channel Occupy energy into national politics. The country was perhaps ready once again, they believed, for what F.D.R. called ‘bold, persistent experimentation’ in our economic affairs,” writes Lewis-Kraus. “For Wong…this election has proved not that the disputes of the 1990s must be fought anew but that they have already been won, decisively and across the board. They have been won on the data, now that we have another two decades of it. And they have been won on the demographics.”
The piece also digs into efforts by Roosevelt to go beyond legislative fixes and ensure federal agencies are staffed by those committed to serving the common good:
“One way that Clinton could signal that she really is serious about the remediation of inequality is through the decisions made by her transition team on personnel. In July, The Boston Globe reported that Roosevelt had been leading a campaign to help staff the economic-policy positions in future presidential administrations.
“Roosevelt’s project, likewise, is about finding people with the economic, legal and regulatory experience to change the country’s balance of power. Wong and her staff have been clear that what they are compiling is nothing so simple as a list. It is, rather, a process by which qualified candidates from all 50 states might be matched to possible jobs. This goes for top positions, like cabinet secretaries or the heads of agencies, but also down to the deputy under secretaries and staff members, whom they could introduce to the system.”
Roosevelt is portrayed as hopeful that its efforts are breaking through. Following the primaries, Secretary Clinton unveiled an updated economic frame in Raleigh that borrows heavily from the Rewriting the Rules report and agenda and has now brought the phrase “rewrite the rules” into her message at campaign events. While far from declaring victory, Lewis-Kraus concludes that “as the party heads into its convention in Philadelphia, this coalition sees encouraging signals — perhaps most notably the role that Elizabeth Warren, a key Roosevelt ally, has come to play in the campaign — that Hillary Clinton’s economic sympathies might ultimately lie further to the left than skeptics supposed.”
Lewis Kraus recounts a conversation with Wong after the Raleigh speech in which she says, “All of my optimism now is based on all of the evidence — on all the polling, on all the people, on what the candidate herself has said. Hillary laid down a marker on Wall Street with her Roosevelt Island speech last year. We thought at the time, She’ll move away from this, and she did. But it was there for her to go back to. And I think that’s been vindicated in the last 48 hours.”
Key Quotes and Passages from the Profile:
“Like no other progressive institution, Roosevelt is bringing strategically relevant insight to the deeper structural problems of our economy.” – Rob Stein, Founder of the Democracy Alliance.
“It’s a new voice in American political discourse. Their message is, We can do better than this! They’re bringing fundamental optimism back to the center of American life.” –Senator Elizabeth Warren, whom the Roosevelt Institute has had a long relationship with starting with her days overseeing TARP and then setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
“Roosevelt and its allies believe that the crisis could have been an occasion — unseen since the New Deal — for the diffusion of authority, large-scale infrastructural investment, attention to low-wage growth and relief for the plight of overextended homeowners rather than banks.”
“Wong herself believes that the financial crisis radically destabilized the politics of the American economy, possibly for decades to come, and that 2016 might well mark the early commotion of a genuine political realignment.”
“Wong and her allies spent a lot more time worrying about Donald Trump than they did valorizing Sanders. Their fear was, and is, that Clinton’s response to Trump’s faux populism, racism, xenophobia and misogyny — that we needed to make America not “great” but “whole” again — would crowd out everything she once said about corporations and inequality.”
“The report lays out a stark narrative about the American economy as it exists today. Inequality, it maintains, is a function not of economic laws but of the preferences awarded to the powerful to extract rents — to exploit people who have little choice — especially on necessary goods like housing and health care. This may have been old wine, but it was poured into new bottles; economists after Keynes lost the habit of talking about power, and Roosevelt stressed that this vision was about the way that power and prejudice created not only distorted markets but also nonfunctional ones. The economy has stalled because too much wealth is being generated in nonproductive activity, hoarded to preserve for the rich all the things government no longer provides. The long-run situation, as Wong put it to me once, is America as “a fear-catalyzed gated community for a privileged few, and a violent, racially hostile, ‘Lord of the Flies’ race to the bottom for the rest of us.’”
“The role of an activist government, as Roosevelt sees it, is not to monopolize any given service, on a command-economy model, but to exist as a permanently nonextortionate market player.”
About the Roosevelt Institute
Until economic and social rules work for all Americans, they’re not working. Inspired by the legacy of Franklin and Eleanor, the Roosevelt Institute reimagines the rules to create a nation where everyone enjoys a fair share of our collective prosperity. We are a 21st century think tank bringing together multiple generations of thinkers and leaders to help drive key economic and social debates and have local and national impact.
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